So it’s hardly surprising that his character crops up in conversation about the Royal Lyceum’s 2013/14 season opener Dark Road, which previews to audiences from tomorrow.
Co-written with the Lyceum’s artistic director Mark Thomson, who also directs, Dark Road is Rankin’s debut stage play.
‘Tense, tough and gritty’, it is billed as ‘a gripping psychological battle of wit and will’ played out between a serial killer, who has protested his innocence for 25 years, and a police chief having a crisis of conscience.
Alfred Chalmers has spent 25 years in prison for the horrific murders of four young girls in the Capital. Isobel McArthur, Scotland’s first female Chief Constable, was one of the team responsible for putting him away. But his conviction has always haunted her.
Approaching retirement, and hungry for answers, she decides to review the case and meet Chalmers in prison, unaware that her own daughter – the ambitious and promiscuous Alexandra – has struck up her own bizarre and disturbing relationship with the killer.
Lyceum favourite Maureen Beattie plays the troubled McArthur and assures she has no qualms about the Rebus connection.
“As far as I am concerned, it’s a thrill to be working with Ian Rankin. This is a man of genius, he’s at the top of his game, the most successful crime-writer in Britain, and I’m sitting there, chatting with him about art, life and the universe.
“Having him in the rehearsal room is just fantastic. He’s so supportive, such a benevolent presence, especially when you think of all the dark material he writes - and this play is very dark. But he, as a person, is not like that at all.”
She laughs, “So you can say Rebus as often as you like.”
Like Rebus, Chief Superintendant McArthur has a dark side, one Beattie believes necessary to reach such a powerful position, especially as a female.
“In the play you discover a lot about what happened to her over a 30-year journey,” she reveals. “There’s tons of stuff to play with and the fact that she is the first female boss character that Ian has created is thrilling. She definitely has a darker side.
“It’s wonderful what Ian and Mark have managed to do between them (and hopefully with my help in rehearsals), to create a multi-layered and multifaceted character. You’re never quite sure what she is going to do next - indeed, she is never quite sure either.
“She needs that dark side to take her to where she is. She was Scotland’s first female Chief Constable, in charge of her area, but because of the restructuring of the Force there is now only one Chief Constable in Scotland and she has been demoted to Chief Superintendent. Even then, to have got to that position as a woman you have to be pretty bloody good at your job, pretty fearsome and not worried about taking no prisoners.”
The award-winning actress, known to millions as nurse Sandra Nichol in Casualty, is joined on stage by Philip Whitchurch, best known as Captain William Frederickson in the ITV drama Sharpe, as Chalmers.
Beattie is no stranger to playing powerful female coppers. As Chief Superintendent Jane Fitzwilliam she handed out the orders in The Bill from 2002 to 2003 - a role that taught her that nothing creates authority better than a well designed police uniform.
“There is something about putting that uniform on which is extraordinary - even just putting on the hat, you see people react.
“These uniforms are so brilliantly designed. They look good on everybody. It doesn’t matter if you are a wee round person or a tall skinny person with no shoulders, they really flatter. Instantly, they make you look like you mean business.”
And a good costume is vital to creating a role on stage Beattie explains. “Belle Jones, who plays a psychiatric nurse in Dark Road, and I were just discussing that, “ she recalls, “how important what you’re wearing is to an actor...
“That moment, just before you go on stage when, without thinking, you look at yourself in a full-length mirror (there’s always one either in your dressing room or just before you step onto the stage) and see who you are. It’s a fantastically supportive thing if you can look in that mirror and go, ‘Yup, there she is’.”
Decked out in serge, Beattie may well look the part, but she confesses a life on the beat is not one for which she could ever have signed up.
“I admire everyone in industries which basically serve us and, having done Casualty, admire nurses more than I can put into words. All these people quietly get on with their jobs. Of course, there are the glamorous ones, the Jane Fitzwilliams, but actually, the foot soldiers are the ones on the front line. I couldn’t be doing anything like that.”
Dark Road, Royal Lyceum, tomorrow-19 October, 7.45pm (matinees 2.30pm), £12-£27.50, 0131-248 4848
Roberta Taylor is currently on your with The Baroness - here, she tells me all about her latest role and paying the gas bill... First published in the Edinburgh Evening News.
Say the name Karen Blixen, her latest role, however, and the chances are you’ll be met with blank looks, unless you also mention the 1985 movie Out of Africa. The film, which won seven Oscars, is loosely based on the autobiographical novel by Isak Dinesen, a pen name of Danish author Karen Blixen.
Born in 1885, Blixen used a number of pen-names in a life plagued with tragedy. When she was just ten years old, her father hanged himself after being diagnosed with syphilis, a condition that would later afflict Blixen herself. She died at the age of 77, in 1962.
At the Traverse on Friday and Saturday, Taylor brings the writer to life in Dogstar Theatre Company’s autumn production,The Baroness - Karen Blixen’s Final Affair, by Thor Bjorn Krebs.
It’s 1948 and Blixen is 62. She has recently met the married and successful 29-year-old poet Thorkild Bjørnvig. The two share a powerful and intimate friendship, one that would last six years before falling apart.
The play charts the course of that liaison and the relationship of a third character, Benedicte Jensen, wife of Bjornvig’s publisher.
“Karen Blixen is a fascinating woman who, in the first half of this play, comes across to some people as not very pleasant,” says Taylor.
“I like that. I like playing people who are truthful and not always using charm, and it is a true story; she had a difficult life, she suffers with syphilis, has had half her stomach taken away, and has bouts of complete agony.”
The challenge of capturing all that for Taylor is heightened by the nature of the piece, which collects together scenes inspired by anecdotes, letters and books by and about both Blixen and her young friend.
“Once it starts, it’s episodic, so you don’t have any chance to prepare for the next scene. You just have to throw yourself into it from the top. Even though time is passing, lights are changing, and music is playing with each scene change, it’s the first time I have done a play in which you just have to dive in like that.”
That Taylor herself is also a writer and novelist (Too Many Mothers was published in 2005 and The Reinvention in 2008) allowed her to better inform her portrayal of Blixen.
“Well I hope it did,” she muses. “At the beginning of the play, she is enduring a ten-year writer’s block, and we all know what that feels like - very, very grim. To compensate she picks young male poets or writers and tries to help them to release themselves.
“So although the play is about lots of things, one of those things is something very close to my heart, which is this - if you want to be an actor, a writer or a musician, you can’t have the mentality of a bank manager and want a regular pay packet. You have to take a gamble with your life. It can never be about the money.
“What Blixen is telling these young men - although you only ever meet the one who was the most important to her, the only one she ever allowed to move in - is that you have to let go of your ordinary life if you want to step into something greater.”
It’s an ethos by which Taylor appears to have lived her own life.
“When I became an actor, I thought that if I could pay my gas bill, I’d be rich. What I find amazing now is that in the 35 years that I have been working, everyone with an ordinary job has to live like that too,” she reflects.
Consequently, the 65-year-old reveals it wasn’t too difficult to give up the regular and lucrative income afforded by her time on our TV screens.
“It wasn’t difficult at all,” she assures, candidly. “I did EastEnders purely for business reasons and it worked, and I stayed at The Bill longer because I had two books to write and it was better to know where I was going to be so that I could work my hours around those hours - each book took me three years to write.”
But while both jobs may have been a means to an end, that’s not to say actress didn’t enjoy them, but then Taylor, a bit like Blixen, is a woman who enjoys extremes.
“I had such a laugh and met such a lot of lovely people doing those shows.
“But TV is such a different discipline. Your brain muscle changes when you have to read scripts and learn lines as you have supper at the end of a 14-hour day.... but at least you have a chance to go again on telly,” she laughs. “You know, I always say an actor is meant to be miserable. If there was a collective noun for actors it would be a grump of actors because, if you’re doing theatre, you want to do telly, and if you’re doing telly, you want to do theatre. I think that’s a great way to keep your mind alive.”
If you also happen to be a talented author, you get to throw writing into the mix too.
“Well, I spend more time writing because I enjoy it more,” confides Taylor.
“I shouldn’t say that really, but I love the fact that theatre and television are so social; you are working with other actors, some you like very much, some you’re maybe not so keen on; either way, you work as a team and you have a laugh.
“When you are writing, you are completely on your own, in peace and quiet. I love both extremes.”
The Baroness - Karen Blixen’s Final Affair, Traverse Theatre, Cambridge Street, Friday and Saturday, 7.30pm, £15.50, 0131-228 1404
"The Story
A serial killer has spent 25 years behind bars but his conviction still haunts Isobel McArthur, Lothian and Borders first female Chief Constable, to the point where she reopens the case leading her down a dark road."
See more at: http://www.lyceum.org.uk/whats-on/production/season-2013-14#sthash.lgJHZTzf.dpuf
In 1948, at the age of 62, Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), writer of Out of Africa, met the 29-year-old poet, Thorkild Bjørnvig. He was newly married and had recently made his successful publishing debut. The two shared a powerful, dangerous and intimate friendship, their pact, which lasted six years before falling apart.
The Baroness is Thor Bjorn Krebs’s provocative, free interpretation of the relationship between Blixen and Bjornvig, a relationship which is both platonic and sexually charged, and which questions and challenges the role and nature of the artist.
A smash-hit in Denmark, this intense, brilliantly written play features the wonderful Roberta Taylor (Eastenders, The Bill) as Blixen, Ewan Donald as Bjornvig and Romana Abercromby as Benedicte Jensen and is directed by Matthew Zajac, creator and performer of The Tailor of Inverness, with music by Aidan O’Rourke of Lau.
Tour details:
September
